MacKenzie interview [Begin Tape 1, Side 2] Warren: So, what do you mean "southern?" How do we define this "southern" establishment we find ourselves in? What does it mean in the 1990s to be a "southern" place? MacKenzie: Mame, what an unfair question. Warren: Oh, you're up to it. MacKenzie: A question whose answer is so hopelessly illusive, or has proved so hopelessly illusive, to people better equipped to hunt it down than I, that I will attempt no comprehensive answer. I will say that the South is a many-layered cultural phenomenon, and most of its layers are mirrored at Washington and Lee. There are red-neckery here, and there is a sort of planter-class, pleasure loving, mint julep slurping, skeet shooting, aristocratic pretension here, and there is very sturdy, insistent, political decency and sort of civil rights mindedness here. There is a great treasury of rags of traditional cultures. You see all we have left of us is rags of traditional culture in the United States. But no place is more decked out in rags of traditional culture than this community. Washington and Lee owes most of that to Rockbridge County and to Lexington, where it has the great good fortune to nestle. But internally, Washington and Lee has an element of the traditional mountain self, not the moss- hung plantation self, but the South of banjos and fiddles and defiant individualism perhaps. But in any case, there are elements here that are at the end of a long and honorable and rich continuity of traditional folk culture here and that part of the United States which has more vestiges of traditional folk culture about it than any 14 other luckless stretch of-what are we-the land of the free and the home of the brave, something like that. Warren: Speaking of tradition, how much of Robert E. Lee was instilled into the students here? And how was the Honor System portrayed to you, and how was it acted out in your time? MacKenzie: I was made to take the Honor System very seriously indeed as a freshman. I say that with some awe at what an achievement that was, because it would be very difficult, I think, to sucker me into taking a thing like that seriously. I don't mean that it is not something that is admirable and therefore to be taken seriously on that level. I believe it is. But to actually get me to volunteer, to sacrifice my self-interest, to an ideal like this, is something that I think no one could do now and which I like to think probably it must have taken some doing seven years ago. So, yeah, I was very serious about it, and I would be plunged into serious internal moral dialogues when I saw even a kind of a harmless honor violation committed before me. I, myself, for a long time never even sort of lied on the phone to the extent of saying, "No, your boyfriend's not here; he just left," because the guy sitting across from me in the room didn't want to talk to her. I couldn't do this. Yeah, I guess I was a bit of a sucker. My impression overall at Washington and Lee was that in private matters, matters of lying to the guy's girlfriend about his having left the room, that kind of thing, matters of picking up a quarter from the sidewalk even though you are pretty sure you are not the one who dropped it there, the Honor System has virtually no impact on anyone's life here. People say to the guy's girlfriend that he has left the room without a nanosecond's hesitation. But it is pretty strictly adhered to. At least when I was a student here it was very strictly adhered to, I must say, as far as I know in matters that really counted. I mean this is a cynical distinction between what 15 doesn't count and what really counts. The ghost of General Lee, no doubt, scowls when we suggest that honor is not an absolute all-or-nothing affair. Nevertheless, in what are commonly thought to be areas that really count-cheating on a take- home exam, lying to your professor about the reason for an absence-I think the Honor Code worked pretty well in those respects when I was a student here. After graduating, I stayed around for about a year, and in that year, and maybe in my senior year-I had my mind on other matters then, really-but laterally there may have been some sort of ominous rumblings in the foundations of the whole thing. A professor once told me in confidence that he was strongly suspicious, having just marked a set of exams, about the similarity of answers that were being churned out-you know exams that you could take them on any day of the week you want. So a person who took the exam on Friday seemed extremely well prepared for an exam written by his fraternity brother on Thursday. That is something I don't think went on, I don't think things like that occurred with any statistical significance when I was a freshman. I may have been totally in the dark. I may have been a contemptible dupe, but that was my impression. Hearsay whispers in my ear that things are darkening now and all is not well with the Honor System. The only sort of sentimental tradition around Washington and Lee whose death, I mean, whose real sort of disillusion, whose transformation from flesh into dust I witnessed here was the speaking tradition. As a freshman, the speaking tradition was flourishing. I once had to fly to Canada on kind of an emergency midway through my fall term as a freshman. So I disembarked at a major international airport in Canada, and within minutes had sort of cleared, this was at a busy time of day so the airport was athrong with irascible and harried and busy people, who within minutes made way for me to the tune of a sort of a twenty-foot- wide corridor just because I was going around making eye contact and smiling and saluting people, saluting informally, I mean, what the French say, g__ people- 16 in a way that led members of day-to-day society to think that I was some kind of sociopath. Yes the Honor System was extremely vibrant here as a freshman. By the time of my senior year, it was so moribund that those of us who were at all emotional about it just thought it had best be sort of shot like a horse racked with cancer. I mean, really it was really sort of pathetic the extent the distances one could walk back and forth on this campus or the hours one could spend walking back and forth without eliciting so much of a nod from any of the sort of surly sophomores and freshmen. Warren: You're talking about the speaking tradition? MacKenzie: Yeah. Warren: You said the Honor System. MacKenzie: Oh, I'm sorry. No, I've been meaning the speaking tradition all along. Warren: Well, that's interesting, because I think it is revived again, because I've been very aware since I've been on campus, and back in the seventies and early eighties, when I was here before, I was not aware that there was such a tradition because I was not aware that anyone spoke here more than anywhere else. But now it's rare that I don't have a brief exchange with virtually everyone. MacKenzie: Well, that's heartening news, I suppose. Perhaps it is the speaking tradition is cyclical, like locusts or something. Warren: I don't know. But I, too, I was in New York last month, and I said hello. I couldn't help myself. I was saying hello to everyone, and indeed they were moving away from me on the sidewalk. [Laughter] Well, let's move into the real reason, presumably, you came here. Let's talk about the classroom and academia. What was your experience in the classroom? Who was important to you and why? 17 MacKenzie: The classroom side of my experience here was superb. I do not think I could have achieved a better education at any university in the world. I don't think there is any university in the world at which a much better education, unless in some highly specialized discipline for which Washington and Lee is not technically equipped, I don't think there is any university in the world at which a much better education can be had by a student interested in acquiring it. Certainly there are a great many of my fellow Washington and Lee graduates who are utter dross intellectually and aren't well educated enough to stand favorable comparison with a waste bin. But this is a problem which Washington and Lee shares with practically every other university in the world. Until I hardened into a sort of degree of cynicism which is my current condition, I was given to amazement at what sort of dolts I met in making my way through the world who had Harvard degrees dangling behind them or who were about to graduate from the University of Oxford or something. Ours is not a culture that tends to cough up interesting or rigorous minds. To the extent that this culture is capable of producing such minds, I think Washington and Lee is as effective a mechanism for the honing of the human mind as exists, but each mind's owner must be prepared to exert himself and to collaborate in a honing process, because, as is the case of every other university, it is very easy to graduate here without receiving anything that a serious person could call an education. My favorite professors were D. Hughes and Taylor Sanders and Ed Craun. In confining things to those three, I know I am doing a grave injustice to a great many other wonderful teachers I had here. Those were the ones, however, with whom I spent the most time and with whom, by luck or chemistry or whatever, my time was the most fruitful. I remember taking an Introduction to Political Philosophy with Professor Hughes and a survey of the first six centuries or so of English literature with Professor Craun. Both of those classes I took in the same term, 18 namely my fall term of my freshman year, and they sort of resonated with each other in a way that was enormously exciting, frankly. I was a very heady sort of moment of discovery for me. Great teachers, both of them. Warren: What department did you wind up majoring in? MacKenzie: The history department. I spent close to as much time, I think, in the English department. And in both those departments and in three or four others, I took full advantage of one of my favorite aspects of the Washington and Lee educational scene, which were these supervised independent study-type things. You know, you invent your own course and get however many credits for it you choose, given the imprimatur of a professor and the promise of supervision and the obligation to have some work to show for it at the end. I think I took at least one such course every term of my college career from winter term freshman year onward. Loved it. And to do myself justice, I didn't waste all of that time. Wasted a good deal of it, as any red-blooded Washington and Lee student could be relied upon to do, but I did achieve intellectual profit from many of those independent study affairs. Warren: Take me into the classroom with, say, Taylor Sanders. Why was he an extraordinary teacher? MacKenzie: He's an extraordinary man. He is a personality who is colorful and entertaining in a way that maybe Homer could describe justly, but I certainly cannot. And his boisterousness and good humor shines through in the classroom and makes it pretty difficult for anyone with a quarter of their cortex functioning not to become excited about the subjects, which he illuminated, I must say, brilliantly. As historians go, his way of analyzing situations and explaining them commands a respect of anyone who understands what real thoughtfulness about history ought to be. 19 Warren: One of the things that impresses me about this place is the size, the classes, how few students are in each class. Was that important to you? MacKenzie: Yeah, that was a consideration that was important in drawing me here, and it remains one of those features of Washington and Lee educational life which I find most worthy of celebration. I never had a class, I don't think, with more than thirty people in it, and one was always disgruntled to have as many people as that, because conversation and interplay and all that was something one expected i~ classes at Washington and Lee, and it worked better when there were only ten of you. Other universities, for a class to be as small as thirty, indicated either a real obnoxiousness on the professor's part or something unpleasantly recondite about the subject matter being studied. Certainly to have as few people in the class seemed many to me at Washington and Lee, to have such few people in a class.at any other university would be an occasion for wonder. Warren: I think you're right about that. It's interesting that they can convey here that it is a success rather than a failure to have such small classes. MacKenzie: Well, I don't think it is particularly difficult to spin-job to suggest it's a failure. I mean, at other universities it would appear a failure just by contrast with a norm which has been determined by the demographics of the university, the cold statistics of student-to-teacher ratio. But Washington and Lee professes a commitment to keeping its classes small as a requirement of its educational philosophy. And it would be a pretty sorry excuse for a school of fewer than 2,000 undergraduates, or whatever it is, if it didn't maintain such small classes and trumpet the fact. I mean, all schools of this size thump the table about the importance of small classes and sort of embarrass their larger competitors with this data, and rightly so. I shudder to think what passes for an education in institutions where students routinely sit in lecture halls with 500 others or 1,000 others, never 20 get invited to dinner at a professor's house and all that other sort of sentimental rhetoric that makes so sickly the air around here and yet is so true and so important. Warren: Tell me about those dinners. MacKenzie: Oh, they were great dinners. John Evans was a particularly masterly thrower of parties in mixtures of people, in his selection of his refreshment and indeed in his role as a conversational catalyst and whatnot. He threw good parties, John Evans. Warren: I don't know him. What department is he? MacKenzie: English. But to single one person out is to behave shabbily towards many others in whose debt I am for a great many good parties and kingly meals. Ed Craun had me over to his house for supper. Taylor Sanders did the same. Many others did, in fact. The Elrods, then Vice President Elrod, now, happily, President Elrod, he and his better half, Mimi, were particularly dedicated and open-handed and capable hosts. I must have eaten a hundred meals there at Washington and Lee with other students, and none of them fail to gleam in memory with sort of a golden hue of good food and good conversation and human comradeship. Warren: Sally tells me you have a special relationship with John Wilson. MacKenzie: I think John Wilson was a great president of Washington and Lee, and I think he is a great and a humane scholar. He is a very good friend of mine, I dare say. I am pleased to boast his friendship. Let me be quoted as saying that. I think very highly of him personally and professionally, a great man. Did great service to this university. Warren: Tell me what you mean by that. MacKenzie: I observed him under attack, fairly sustained attack, by various sort of congenitally mischief-making students with the flimsiest of rationale given for these attacks. He disported himself through all this turmoil with jaw-dropping graciousness and deftness, and none of it ever caused him to waiver in the course 21 he was determined to put this university on in terms of who was getting scholarships and what departments would be receiving monies and what kinds of hiring decisions for the faculty were being made. I see John Wilson's presence behind a vast array of very healthy developments which occurred at this university during his reign. Warren: I had a really stimulating interview with him. His passion for the place was just contagious. I don't know how I had the audacity, but he was the first interview I did, and, boy, what a standard to set. It was really exciting, and it was wonderful because he really brought me up to snuff on what's been going on here. He was an extraordinary person. When I walked out of his house, there was no question why he had been president. MacKenzie: Yes, that comes as no surprise. An elegant and brilliant man. Warren: And passionate. I was very struck by how firm his resolve was in things that he cared about. One of the things that we talked about in great depth was the whole Fraternity Renaissance program, which I realized you were here during the midst of that. MacKenzie: I was. Indeed. Warren: And the houses were being torn apart while you were here, is that right? MacKenzie: Yeah. Warren: I haven't talked to anybody who was a student at that time. What was the take of the students on the program? MacKenzie: Well, the fraternity people moved from a sort of wary gratitude, rather like survivors of the sack of Troy looking at another pile of treasure sent them by some Greeks. They moved from that sort of position when they were offered these opulent houses for free, and all that, to a real kind of reactionary guerrilla mentality. The Fraternity Renaissance was swiftly transformed in the minds of fraternity people from an offering that they were unsure of how they were to receive, the 22 motivation behind which puzzled them, to an outright threat. I mean, it seemed to fraternity people a ploy by the university to extend its control over fraternity life in a way that could be accomplished in no other way to strip fraternities of their independence and to impose on them a kind of fascistic order, which horrified- perhaps I'm using overblown language-but it quickly became fashionable among fraternity students to grumble that they had been had by the university in all this. They had just traded their independence for opulent houses, which didn't turn out to be so opulent after all and certainly which tended to have things in them fall apart with disconcerting ease. The Fraternity Renaissance scheme involved the fraternities surrendering the leases on these properties, the property rights to these houses, to the university. Fair enough, one might think, given what the university was doing with this property, but this placed before the university on a silver platter the right to dictate to fraternities what they could and could not drink, how much they could and could not drink, what their admissions policies to parties must be, and all of that, to dictate terms of this kind, with much more enforceability than had been the case previously. And this, I must say, really did interfere with fraternity social life. No doubt some sort of accommodation between the two warring parties has been reached. And I will never, having come through a fraternity, I will never think of the university and fraternities, I mean, the university administration and the fraternities as anything other than, at best, uneasy, mutually suspicious allies who have signed a pact for cynical reasons of self-interest and more frequently as two factions which are permanently at war. I understand the motives behind the Fraternity Renaissance program. I cannot be as eloquent about them as John Wilson, no doubt, has been. Certainly some of the destructive forms of fraternity behavior, which I suspect the Renaissance Program was designed to curtail, have been successfully curbed. But I 23 can't say I'm not given to occasional moments of indulgence in this kind of wistfulness for the old days of real fraternity raunchiness, uncorralled by the university, the kind of wistfulness in which the reservation Indian thinks about Geronimo still on the mountains on the horizon. Warren: I actually got invited to a fraternity party, in fact, the shipwreck party. MacKenzie: Oh, at Sigma Nu. Warren: I went last week. I've rarely been to such a staid, controlled, almost boring party. MacKenzie: You break my heart. Warren: I'm sorry. You were Sigma Nu? MacKenzie: Yeah. Warren: Yeah, I figured by talking about the sawdust coming in. MacKenzie: Yeah, they are not the only ones who do that, I don't think. Warren: The students, the people there, were having a grand time and were saying what a wild party it was, but maybe I go to better parties than they do. [Laughter] MacKenzie: Of that I have no doubt, Mame. Warren: I look forward to inviting my host at that party to one of my parties and let him see what a real party is. I'm really glad you were here during that time. That's a perspective that I've only gotten the other side, the administration side, on Fraternity Renaissance. I think your perspective is a really important perspective. MacKenzie: Yes. Certainly in those months, these underground fraternity meetings, you know, the closed meetings in which the brotherhood meets after many Latin tags are uttered and whatnot. The fraternity meetings at my house and at many another, I have good reason to believe, had about them a sort of persecuted, conspiratorial air of, you know, when the Palestinians were being overrun by the Roman Empire. Picture these cells of Palestinian resistance fighters, Jewish resistance fights, trying to concoct plots to subvert the invader. Whether to retreat 24 to Masada or attempt to make a last stand somewhere else or just to devote oneself to sabotage. I mean, there was sort of hushed, kind of desperate militant tone among these fraternity guys who saw their rights to behave as they thought fraternity guys ought to behave being revoked. Warren: Literally, where did those meetings take place when the houses were being torn apart? Where did fraternity life happen while Renaissance was going on? MacKenzie: There was a small sort of infrastructure in town that could absorb the fraternity activity that was displaced by the Renaissance Program because the Renaissance Program worked incrementally. Not all houses were at the same stage of reconstruction at the same moment. I mean, they dealt with a few houses and then moved to a few others, and that kind of thing. So because it was sort of an episodic process, Lexington was not overwhelmed by displaced or dispossessed fraternity brothers. It would have been a terrible fate for a genteel place like Lexington to suffer. My fraternity rented the space that is now, before and since, had been sort of a site of luckless restaurants, formerly the Raven and Crown and now something else. No doubt before very long, yet again something different will be there. That sort of underground thing. We held meetings there, and we did parties there. Other fraternity houses displaced their activities on to big houses in town with which, at least in some cases, a fraternity had some kind of historical association with. Most fraternities have at least one house in town which is always filled by brothers of that fraternity and which is always used as an alternative space for parties when the university is cracking down on their fraternity house. So I think few fraternities, if any, were without recourse when they were turfed out of their main house by the Renaissance. 25 Warren: I'm going to let you be the Washington and Lee University Student-with capital S. What's the relationship with Lexington? MacKenzie: I regret to say I am not, on that subject, the Washington and Lee Student, with a capital S. I had the good fortune to establish a much more dense web of connections with Lexington and Rockbridge County than most students at Washington and Lee. The more interesting students and Washington and Lee tend to know a good thing when they see one and to do what they can to achieve toeholds in the community there. Some of us do a little too much in that respect and never leave, or if we do leave, leave only for lives of embitterment of drooping hopes and melancholia. Warren: We do allow people back, you know. MacKenzie: But those are the more interesting students. Most others sort of pass. I think the capital S student you are looking for, for whom I cannot speak, but if faced with a firing squad and required to hazard some conjecture on the capital S Washington and Lee Student perspective towards Lexington, it is pretty much of a cliche, town-gown thing, that Washington and Lee students sort of pass unseeing through Aladdin's cave here, never really get in touch with the wonders that are available to them living here, and sort of move on after four years, oblivious of what they have missed. Pathetic sight, but one which I suspect is going on all around us. Warren: My little light is beeping here. Are you willing to talk for a few minutes more? [Begin Tape 2, Side 1] Warren: This is Mame Warren. It's May 20, 1996, and I'm still with Niall MacKenzie. We're talking about Washington and Rockbridge County. So what does Niall think? Forget the Washington and Lee Student. What does Niall think about your experiences in Washington? 26 MacKenzie: My favorite line about Rockbridge County, minted by-I never heard of whom, I don't think, is that half the people here have written a book and other half can't read one, which, while being a generalization, does sort of capture this juxtaposition of the kind of moonshine-swilling, marijuana-growing, shotgun- toting, redneck lair of the community, if such colorful and largely decent people can be labeled with such a dismissive term as "redneck," and among whom, unfortunately, are members of what we in the fraternity dining hall would jocularly refer to as the Tri Cap Fraternity. The juxtaposition of that whole world with a strata of the population here, more vibrant culturally and more packed with interesting and sophisticated people than is any stratum of the population of any demographically comparable, any part of the country that has a population along the lines of this, a social organization sort of along the lines of Rockbridge County's. Rockbridge County is unique in the critical mass of sophisticated and interesting people that persist here, very little of which people have anything to do, I'm pleased to say, with any of the universities in Rockbridge County. At least very few of these people are mixed up in the faculty of any of these universities. A good many of them are Washington and Lee graduates of the confused years of the Vietnam War, don't seem to have found it necessary to leave. I had the good fortune to have my eyes opened to this most interesting dimension, possible dimension of the Washington and Lee experience, and it became the dimension in which I chose to make the primary one. I moved in. That's what I think about Rockbridge County. Topographically, climatically, geologically, geographically, in all those regards, it is the most beautiful and compelling patch of ground in the United States, I'm convinced, and in human terms it is probably the most compelling area in the United States as well, I strongly suspect. Warren: That's why I'm here. Why do you think that is? 27 MacKenzie: Perhaps an Indian medicine man long ago cast a spell on the place and endowed it with an eternal charm and eternal appeal to interesting people. That's as good a guess as I can hazard. I mean, scientists in various disciplines can explain to us why it happens to be as beautiful. Scientists in various disciplines can explain to us the reasons behind the physical characteristics of the place, and specialists in esthetics and semiotics can explain to us why we as humans find these physical conditions so very appealing, but the beauty of the landscape doesn't go the distance in terms of explaining what is so compelling about this place. I can't say. I would draw attention to something about the landscapes that slide by one's window when one is getting lost in these sort of spider's web of roads that lose themselves among the hills here, these pictures that slide past one's window. In this respect, this area is not unique, but this is certainly an assertive, one of the defining features of this locality. There is this sort of easy-going negotiation between history and nature going on all around-the woodpiles that are kind of slumping just into overgrown mounds; and ancient haystacks and old barns that are sort of half-collapsed; moldering fences that are beginning to merge into the hillsides which they were built upon; telephone poles which are now hung with moss. The things that man has done to this setting and which man has done to himself in this setting have been absorbed by the setting in very intriguing ways visually. A point which brings us within spyglass range of the historical dimension, the history here, which is fascinating, and even if one is not saturated consciously with information about the stream of history which one is standing in when one is standing on Main Street, in subtle ways one cannot escape the qualities that this place has been endowed with by its history. I was once writing a piece in which I came up, I dare say, with a very good line about the embarrassment of Civil War heroes that this county and a few adjacent 28 counties can lay claim to. Selfishly, I will not share my line with you, because I intend to use it one day. I don't want to let loose in the culture before- Warren: You did sign away on this. [Laughter] MacKenzie: I know that. Before I open fire in my own good time. I'm sorry. I could tell you off the record. Warren: I wait with bated breath 'til we turn off the machine. You mentioned a sense of history. The reason we're sitting here is that Washington and Lee is looking its 250th anniversary in the eye. What can we do to properly celebrate this place in such a moment in history? MacKenzie: We can raise our hats to it as-no pun-honorable example of civilization struggling to assert itself in midst of poverty and defeat and materialism, war, and many other unpleasant things bound up in the frontier experience of the United States and, indeed, many unpleasant things implicated at the heart of the American experience. Washington and Lee, at its best, is an outpost of civilization on this pretty barren shore, and what we can do to pay homage to it, other than recognize it as being that and dipping it an admiring bow, is to steel ourselves in the defense of civilization in the United States in our lifetime, a cause for which the prospects are not good, I'm sorry to say. Warren: I think this is an extraordinary place, in an extraordinary place, and I want to make sure we do it right. Two hundred years doesn't happen but once every two hundred and fifty years. As I have said to my friends from whence I came, this is the job of a lifetime. I'm not going to get to do this again. Nobody's going to get to do this again in my lifetime. I really appreciate your point of view. I've really enjoyed spending the time with you. 29 So I want to turn it over to you. Is there anything more you'd like to say, and is there anything you'd like to see us do, and in particular in this book I'm putting together, that I, as an outsider, might not think about? MacKenzie: Outsider, no. I have perfect confidence that this acknowledgeably formidable task has been set in a correct pair of hands. Warren: Thank you. MacKenzie: And that your hands will manage it gracefully. So no advice from me. Warren: Is there anything that we haven't talked about that you'd like to? MacKenzie: I think you've drawn me out pretty fully, Mame. Warren: It's been a pleasure and an honor to do so. MacKenzie: The pleasure's been mine. Thank you. Warren: Thank you. [End of interview] 30